These five high school kids are students at one of the public schools serviced by The Ponheary Ly Foundation, the organization I’ll be moving to full-time starting in late August.

In the meantime, before my new job starts, I’m teaching a three-week English cram course with these five kids, focused specifically on English for media and blogging. I’m excited because this helps me get to know one of our schools and some of the students I’ll be working for.

These kids already used their communication skills to create a blog and change their world. A student production team led by Sen (on the left in the picture above) made this video in April and posted it to YouTube, inspiring someone in another country to fix the water well problem in Sen’s village.
This same student media team recently won first place and $10,000 after they entered a worldwide competition with a different video. Click here to see their winning video.

As things go in Cambodia, there’s a challenge to my new English blog class. During our first class this morning the government announced that as of tomorrow, the school is being shutdown until October because of fears about the spread of a disease that’s attracted international media attention on Cambodia.

6 Responses to Government Throws Curveball for My New Class

These are very talented students! The disease is very scary! The video of the lines of children waiting to get help is unreal! Steroids the cause??? Hopefully you will get another place to help these five students very soon! Media and blogging should be a great learning experience for you all!!!!!

It’s been really good Mom! I have lots of activity ideas that remind me of things we did with you when we were kids. Thank you 🙂 My class has gone from five to 12 students so I guess that’s a good sign! I love you.

Those videos are fantastic! What talents the students have demonstrated! I hope by the time you get this you have found a new location for the class! Sounds like the mystery to the illness has been solved. I hope what they determined takes care of it and prevents it from continuing. Love, Kaki.